The heavily counterfactual character of the most consequential risks is closely bound up with the numbness that a listing of them tends to promote. In mediaeval times, the invention of hell and damnation as the fate of the unbeliever in the afterlife was “real.” Yet things are different with the most catastrophic dangers which face us today. The greater the danger, measured not in terms of probability of occurrence but in terms of its generalised threat to human life, the more thoroughly counterfactual it is. The risks involved are necessarily “unreal,” because we could only have clear demonstration of them if events occurred that are too terrible to contemplate. Relatively small-scale events, such as the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the accidents at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, give us some sense of what could happen. But these do not in any way bear upon the necessarily counterfactual character of other, more cataclysmic happenings—the main basis of their “unreality” and the narcotising effects produced by the repeated listing of risks. As Susan Sontag remarks, “A permanent modern scenario: apocalypse looms —and it doesn’t occur. And still it looms… . Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not ‘Apocalypse Now’, but ‘Apocalypse from now on’ “.

XREF: Echoes Ulrich Beck's 'risk society' and the idea that apocalyptic threats are low-probability but high-consequence, which numbs rather than mobilizes.

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Moderni…, loc. 325